"one of the funniest experiments ever performed in computer science
.. it is a small milestone in human history to have produced a machine
that can do this."
- Andrew Brown
in
The Darwin Wars.

How my program passed the Turing Test

by Mark Humphrys.

When I was an undergraduate in 1989
I hooked up an Artificial Intelligence "chatbot"
called "MGonz"
to the Internet,
with interesting results.
For many years I told people about it,
and there was always a certain amount of interest.
In 1995 I finally got around to setting up this page to tell everyone about it.

Introduction

In 4th year (early 1989),
I hooked it up to my Net account
(on the node IRLEARN
on EARN/BITNET),
so that when I was logged off
(or to be precise, disconnected,
from a VM/CMS system),
it would process all talk messages sent to me.
There were numerous hilarious incidents, but this is the best one.

So, it's Tuesday 2nd May 1989, 8.12pm in Ireland.
I've logged out
and gone off with my girlfriend,
leaving Eliza (or "MGonz" as I called it) to mind the fort.
So some guy on the Net decides to call me up for a chat.
Someone from Drake University, Iowa, USA
(the node DRAKE
on BITNET)
where it is early afternoon.
He stays talking until 9.39pm Irish time, unaware that no one is at home.
You could say therefore that my program passed the "Turing Test"
(see What is the Turing Test?).

During this time, my machine's brutal cross-examination
forces a remarkable admission:

* when was the last time you had sex 05/02/89 20:25:50
From SOMEONE at DRAKE: yesterday. 05/02/89 20:26:2
* ok honestly when was the last time you got laid 05/02/89 20:31:20
From SOMEONE at DRAKE: i told you it was yesterday. 05/02/89 20:31:5
* ok honestly when was the last time you got laid 05/02/89 20:35:48
From SOMEONE at DRAKE: ok ok it was over 24 hours ago. for you it must have 05/02/89 20:36:5
been 20 years 05/02/89 20:36:56

Police interrogation teams will be familiar with this method of
"keep asking the same question, ignoring all answers, until he cracks".
Note the timestamps on the RHS.
The next day, I logged in, and was amazed to find out what my machine
had been up to in my absence.

I think the success of my MGonz
is mainly due to its obscenity and relentless aggression.
Cleaning it up would severely weaken the conversation.
But of course this means that I have found it quite difficult
to publish this or publicize it.
I did not set up this web page until 1995.

Of course this is all nothing to do with AI,
as I elaborate on the
Turing Test page.
It's no coincidence that Hutchens and I
are both professional AI researchers
who disown our own creations.

The LISP Source Code

If you can decipher it, you may see that there were also
various strokes of luck during the conversation.
See if you can work this one out:

From SOMEONE at DRAKE: what? why don't you type something new. like when was 05/02/89 21:27:1
the 05/02/89 21:27:14
* paris is a beautiful city 05/02/89 21:27:19
From SOMEONE at DRAKE: last time that you got laid..unless it was when you 05/02/89 21:28:2
were born o'my he said something different. a 05/02/89 21:28:25

In fact, the very introduction of the whole line of questioning about sex
was a complete accident (though once the user responded,
MGonz was guaranteed to stay on the topic).
See if you can work out why this happened:

From SOMEONE at DRAKE: are there two people on your username? 05/02/89 20:25:4
* when was the last time you had sex 05/02/89 20:25:50

I never found out who that user at DRAKE was.
Perhaps someone I had previously "met" in a chatroom on
Relay
(the ancestor of IRC),
or maybe a friend of someone I met on Relay:

Anyway, he's a hero whoever he is.
To explain the absurd repetitiveness of my sayings,
he constructs a fantastic theory that I might have "hot-keys" attached to
particular phrases:

From SOMEONE at DRAKE: are there two people on your username? 05/02/89 20:25:4
...
From SOMEONE at DRAKE: do you have all these silly sayings on some sort of 05/02/89 20:30:4
control? 05/02/89 20:30:47
* ok thats it im not talking to you any more 05/02/89 20:30:52
From SOMEONE at DRAKE: you sound like a goddamn robot that repeats everything. 05/02/89 20:31:1
...
From SOMEONE at DRAKE: o my he actually typed something. 05/02/89 21:38:5
* ah type something interesting or shut up 05/02/89 21:39:03
From SOMEONE at DRAKE: you type slow is that why you have all those stupid 05/02/89 21:39:4
sayings on command like that last one? 05/02/89 21:39:43

but never quite makes the mental jump to realise
that there is no one at home at all.

One of the things that made MGonz successful
was the element of surprise.
Users of a CGI script Eliza expect to be talking to a program.
Users in the Loebner (Turing Test) contest expect
that some of the entrants will be machines.
But no one expected to hit a program
when they sent me BITNET chat messages.

In 2000,
AOLiza
returned to the element of surprise
on the AOL Instant Messenger
system.
Like my program, and unlike the Loebner test,
users do not expect to be talking to a machine.
Some coverage of AOLiza:

Finally, I wrote the program when I was 18.
Some of the more conservative Web filtering programs would regard that as a minor
and hence would have denied me the right to look at my own creation!
I put it online when I was 20.

Despite its foul language, MGonz is now linked to by various teaching courses:

So where does this name come from, people have asked.
Well, every time we queried who was logged on to our undergraduate VAX machine,
there was this mysterious user MGONZ, logged in day and night.
Inevitably, a mythology grew up around him, a Church of MGonz was founded, and so on.

Eventually, I wrote to
the sacred address
and found that MGONZ was the account
of one Manuel Gonzales from Barcelona,
who did a PhD at the Experimental Physics Dept c.1988 -
supervisor Peter Mitchell
- and had since returned to Spain, leaving behind his account which was being used as a sort of group account by his former colleagues.
Because he left a VAX terminal hooked up with customised software to a radioactivity-measuring instrument,
MGONZ remained in operation for years
(last sighting Apr 1997).
I'd love to link from here to the real, Spanish MGONZ,
but I'm afraid for the moment, he is lost somewhere out there in the ether.

MGonz as a name just keeps on going.
It has now spawned the name of a fictional person/bot
"Liz" Gonzales
(a combination of "Eliza" and "MGonz")
in a
story by
Jon Camfield.
He also seems to have misread the first name as "Matthew"
and named another character "Mateo" after it.

The title of this page, "How my program passed the Turing Test",
was originally completely tongue-in-cheek
- I just wanted a catchy title.
But a lot of people thought I meant it seriously.

I don't really care which way you take it.
There are ways in which you could claim yes, it did pass the Turing Test,
and so have lots of other programs,
and so what.

History of AI programs online

MGonz was certainly one of the first AI programs online.
I think it may have been the first
(a) AI real-time chat program,
which (b) had the element of surprise,
and (c) was on the Internet.

To explain, there were many AI chat programs before MGonz
(for a survey see
Bots below),
but they were mainly flagged as such
(no element of surprise, as in the AI chat CGI scripts today),
or offline, e.g. on games systems or local networks.
Also, I am calling BITNET part of the Internet
- see justification for this in my page on
The Internet in the 1980s.

Jenny18 simply blows MGonz away.
This bot, ruthlessly specialising on pretending to be
a horny girl looking for cyber-sex,
actually manages to bring some users
all the way to orgasm.
See
"dom01"
and
"Happy_Boy"
in the
logs.
The most hilarious conversation is
"Scorpion832".
For more possible orgasms see
"GoldenBoy2222"
and
"lander100".

The "orgasm" Turing Test
(i.e. the computer brings the human to orgasm)
has been passed by Jenny18.

Sex bots and flirt bots

Spammers and credit card scammers
have been turning to bots that pretend to be flirting / webcamming girls.
As MGonz and Jenny18 show, sex is a fertile field for getting humans to lose their critical faculties.

Flirt bots.
A Chatbot will pretend to be a girl looking for love, or a girl offering to webcam.
The bot lures men onto a different site to continue the chat / webcam,
where they are asked to enter credit card details to confirm their age.

The Basshunter song
Boten Anna
(2006)
is about a real-life incident where the confusion was the other way round.
The singer was on IRC
and thought a friend's girlfriend
was a bot.

[15:38] <tifftaff> hey there, hows it going?
[15:38] <policewoman> Hey there
[15:38] <tifftaff> i'm 21/f are you a male?
[15:38] <tifftaff> what's your asl dude?
[15:38] <policewoman> 20/machine/computer
[15:39] <tifftaff> nice, I'm just finished work and found you on a channel
[15:39] <tifftaff> I know a better way we can chat
[15:40] <tifftaff> we can chat on cam, do you want to see me on cam?
[15:40] <policewoman> No thanks, that's a suspicious statement, are you human? Answer the following what's 10 x 10 x 10
[15:41] <tifftaff> ok i need your personal information first
[15:41] <tifftaff> great, i cannot wait to see youy
[15:42] <tifftaff> your awesome, I'll show boys like you to have a good time
[15:43] <tifftaff> you need a atm card number, do you have one?
[15:44] <policewoman> now that's suspicious, are you human? If JOhn has 3 apples and throws away two, how many are left?
[15:44] <tifftaff> are you in yet babe?
[15:45] <tifftaff> k

Two bots talk to each other:
Two students of mine,
Meabh Landers and David Cullen,
write a scambot-detecting bot, "policewoman".
It responds to requests to webcam and requests for credit card info
by trying to detect if the other side is human.
They released it on
IRC
where it found the above scambot, "tifftaff", in March 2013.
It is written in
mIRC scripting language.

The future of AI online

I suggest that the future of AIs online
lies in a scheme enabling the construction of large distributed minds,
the "World-Wide-Mind".